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Artworks
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Joan Semmel: A Balancing Act, Installation view, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown (2021)
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Joan Semmel: A Balancing Act, Installation view, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown (2021)
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:
Joan Semmel: A Balancing Act, Installation view, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown (2021)
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:
Joan Semmel: A Balancing Act, Installation view, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown (2021)
Joan Semmel
Cold Shoulder, 2020Oil on canvas24 x 18 in (61 x 45.7 cm)JS438Further images
In Cold Shoulder (2020), Semmel’s abstract use of color and nearly monochromatic background are reminiscent of her compositional approach to the Sex Paintings and Erotic Images series, for which she...In Cold Shoulder (2020), Semmel’s abstract use of color and nearly monochromatic background are reminiscent of her compositional approach to the Sex Paintings and Erotic Images series, for which she gained recognition early in her career. Since the 1970s, Joan Semmel has centered her practice around representations of the body from a female perspective, most often focusing on self-portraiture. In her most recent body of paintings, a single over life-sized figure fills the canvas in a manner that echoes the in-camera cropping of the photographs the artist takes as the basis for her compositions. The stark contrast between the shades of magenta used to render the curves flesh and the monochromatic lemon-yellow plane of color in which the body is suspended heightens the impact of light in the composition. Bright sunlight, which floods the artist’s studio, casts a striking glow against the figure’s back as she her face and shoulders turn toward the shadows, the effect of which critic Johanna Fateman has described as “passages of smoldering chiaroscuro.”
Exhibitions
2021: A Balancing Act, Alexander Gray Associates, Germantown, NY3of 3
